The Writer’s Center welcomes Susan Scheid and Burgi Zenhausern for a launch of their respective new books, True Blue and White Door.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Susan Scheid is the author of After Enchantment, which was inspired by beloved fairy tale characters. Scheid’s poetry has appeared in The Southern Quill, Blue Heron Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Burgeon Press, Gargoyle, About Place Journal, Truth to Power, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, The Sligo Journal, Silver Birch Press, Tidal Basin Review, and other journals. Her work is also included in the anthologies, Poetic Art, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic. Scheid served for a number of years as the Board co-chair for Split This Rock. She lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) grew up in Switzerland. She majored in English and Spanish Literature and Linguistics at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and attended workshops led by Rose Solari, Jean Nordhaus, Laura Fargas, and Yvette Neisser at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She is the author of White Door (Carbonation Press, 2025), her debut full-length poetry collection. Her chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020) won the 2019 Harriss Poetry Prize, chosen by Erica Dawson, final judge, and Kwame Alexander, series editor. She co-edited the translations of the bilingual poetry anthology Knocking on the Door of the White House (Zozobra Publishing, 2017, J. Ballesteros et al., editor), which was selected by Beltway Poetry Quarterly as a “2017 Ten Best” book. Her poem “To her fury” was a runner-up in the inaugural Ashland Poetry PressBroadside Contest 2023. Work of hers appeared in a variety of journals and in the anthology From the Belly: poets respond to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Karren Alenier, editor, The Word Works, 2023). She volunteered behind the scene for the Café Muse reading series and served as consulting editor for the online journal River Mouth Review. She lives in Chevy Chase, MD, on Piscataway and Nacotchtank land.
About True Blue
This book was built around poems written about and during the pandemic. Broken into three sections, the first one asks us to look at what we may have lost during that time, connections we longed to have—memory, ancestors, family. The middle section describes the struggles and hard feelings many experienced: isolation, grief, chaos, depression, eventually leading us to a path of resilience, strength and hope. The book ends with praise poems that show how hope can be found in the smallest thing, and in the big questions we ask. These poems navigate life’s struggles and remind us that in end we are stronger for having lived through them.
About White Door
In a wide range of formally varied and playful poems, the speaker of White Door explores her emigration to the US from a European country as an adult: how fundamentally and irreversibly distance and longing change old perspectives and memories; how watching her child grow up in a in many ways alienating environment helped root her while challenging ideas of herself; what a complex and ambivalent web of emotions questions of home and belonging can set off; how there is no one nor any definite answer. In that sense, the poems are largely autobiographical and self-reflective. Their poetry is firmly rooted in the speaker’s everyday and the bonds that hold her.
In White Door, Burgi Zenhaeusern circles back again and again to necessary, enduring questions—how to care for each other, what home is—refusing to settle for anything less than the real. Despite the way exploration tends to “re-etch longing,” despite the complexities of language and being, these poems do not give up their hunger to understand. Intelligence and integrity shine through them. Kasey Jueds, author of The Thicket
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